Bangalore has everything: fair male strippers for hen nights, shopping arcades with Hugo Boss and Montblanc, apartments that are rising at a ferocious rate. In the heart of the city, I noticed a large area of land had been fenced off for a development calling itself “Brigade Gateway — Bangalore’s first lifestyle enclave”.

The perimeter road was surrounded by billboards promising a future paradise on Earth, where every need would be met.

Once complete, the lifestyle enclave would have private security, a hospital, its own school, a health spa, a hotel, a food court and restaurants, all sealed from the masses.

One billboard showed a man in jeans walking his dog beside a lake in what looked like North America, with the caption in English and the bouncy Kannada script: “Stroll alongside a serene lake.” Adverts promised a helipad, sculpture courts, a bamboo grove, patrolled private roads, fountains and “a better quality of life”. You could buy a luxury apartment in Brigade Gateway with a fitted German kitchen. “Each wing will have two high-speed passenger lifts. Uninterrupted power supply (we have back-up generators to generators!) will ensure that you need to take the stairs only if you want the exercise.” The wisdom of the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto was quoted in evidence: “True architecture exists only where man stands in the centre.”

It was quite a promise. I wondered how it was being put into effect, and joined a line of labourers as they advanced glumly onto the 40-acre site for the morning shift. They wore yellow hard hats, and some carried tiffin boxes. Although there were bright signs promoting the need to have boots with metal toecaps, most of the men were wearing plastic sandals. The place was a mess of mud and gravel. The labourers had to work on buildings that rose to 30 storeys, and safety nets had been slung around the higher reaches, though in a random way that offered no anticipation of capture.

I asked a security guard from Madhya Pradesh — we’ll call him Dhruv — how many people had died there that year (this was in October 2008). His answer was, seven or eight. He stressed he was only talking about his own section of the site. He was unsure how many people had been injured — casualties were usually sent straight back to their home villages.

At the heart of the site I entered one of the apartment blocks. The staircase was half-built, and I was able to climb nearly to the top. All around, across the skyline, grey shells were rising. These were two- and three-bedroom apartments, and workers from West Bengal were running pipes between them. They said they were paid Rs150 (£2.17) a day, but that the contractor or gang master who employed them took one quarter of their salary illegally.

I watched as these men dragged and winched and hammered and drilled. The quality of the construction was fairly good, but I was puzzled by a boxroom on the outside of each apartment, less than two metres square, accessible only from the common staircase. Was it a storage or wiring closet? No, it was the servant’s room. Each apartment would need a servant, and this was where he or she would be living, without windows or fresh air.

Back at the main gate I asked Dhruv where the hundreds of labourers lived, and he offered to take me to a “housing colony”, as he was nearing the end of his shift. Three big companies were responsible for the main construction project. We went to see the accommodation that was used by the workers of one of these, Simplex Infrastructures. It was off a road about 15 minutes’ walk from the construction site. Indian cities are full of slums and bad housing, but this was in a special category of its own.

It was reasonably easy to get inside. Dhruv had assumed that, because I was white and quite smartly dressed, I must be on official business, while the guard at the colony let me in because I was with Dhruv. The place stank of rotting food and latrines, and amounted to little more than a network of paths awash with dirty water, which led to sheds made of wood and corrugated iron. This was where the labourers lived for months or even years at a time. They came originally from Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, and had been recruited in their villages to come south as workers. They told me a contractor was holding their wages and taking a large cut. But, as a listless teenage boy from Buxar named Prem said: “What can we do? We can do nothing. My family don’t even know where I am.”

Prem showed me inside the sheds. There was no electricity, so I used the light on my mobile phone to look around (the cheaper Indian mobiles usefully contain a flashlight). The concrete floor was lined with thin plastic mats, like beach mats, each one about the size of a single mattress, and at the head of each mat were some folded blankets and washing utensils. “Is this where you sleep?” I asked Prem, who was wrapped in a blanket and shivering with fever.

“Two persons sleep on each mat,” said Dhruv.

Two? At the same time?

“Yes,” said Dhruv. “We sleep close together.”

Above the mats were lines of rough string hanging across the shed. Little pictures of deities and religious places were propped in the webs of string. Each man had a length on which to hang his clothes and possessions. This was his sacred thread, the nearest thing he had to privacy. It was not difficult to imagine the atmosphere in the colony each evening when the workers returned: the hunger, the exhaustion, the arguments, the fights, the stink of sewage, the trips to cheap drinking dens and the brothels by the nearby garment factory, and the nightly return to the shared plastic mat. I was outraged by the conditions here, because they were so easily avoidable. This was not an embedded social problem where any solution might throw up a host of new complaints. It was not a case of intractable poverty, or of bosses who were unable to pay their workers more. The cheapest apartments in Brigade Gateway were selling at just under Rs10m (£145,000), and for the cost of few square metres, for the cost of a servant’s closet, these migrant labourers could have been built proper accommodation. When I asked Dhruv if all the workers at Brigade Gateway had to live in such conditions, he said this colony was probably the worst. Some other housing colonies had bunks with mattresses.

I contacted Simplex and asked some basic questions about arrangements for their workers. Nobody wanted to be interviewed. Eventually they responded through a third party: “Mr French’s letter is a little embarrassing for us, and I don’t think we’ll be making any kind of response. He says he has visited our site, and yet the only thing he would like to know is how much we pay our labourers. He has no interest in the structure, or how it is being built… He is writing about India and I do not understand why he needs to know how much we pay our labourers. How is it related to his subject matter? So, we would not like to respond.”

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CATCHING the once-a-week flight from Delhi to Karachi last Monday, I overheard a riveting exchange between the immigration officer who was handling my Indian passport and a worried man who rushed to speak to him in a hurry, I suspect, after seeing my bearded profile from a distance.

In my banterish way I engaged both of them in a conversation about their source of worry. Upon close inquiry the man who had rushed to the passport desk with doubts about my bona fides turned out to be a religious Muslim from Uttar Pradesh who hadn’t watched TV for decades. His job was to alert the officers about any Kashmiris going to Pakistan, or perhaps anywhere at all.

What or who they were looking for was their business and I didn’t ask beyond a point, but I did glean from the chat that the government of India hires semi-literate and obscurantist Muslims who don’t watch TV for religious reasons, to keep an eye on their fellow brethren who may have given up watching TV because Indian channels usually misrepresent the reality as distinct from what they know it to be.

The incident also gave me useful insights into at least some of the reasons for the poor intelligence and security that haunts the country as it claims its seat in the colosseum where the duel with terror is perennially on.

link

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Naturally, students are tensed about exams quite often. But we also learn that Anjali Tendulkar gets tensed every time Sachin is about to start batting.

Someone faked a kidnapping and his employer got tensed and called the police.

The TOI writes about many tensed people too.

Hope you have a suitably untensed weekend.

Updated to add:
This post is now a part of the red marker blogathon.

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In between Mahoba and Chhattarpur districts lies Khajuraho airport. Swanky roads and five-star hotels dot the tourist destination and belie the silent human catastrophe unfolding just kilometres away. Drought may have ravaged the fields but State apathy and the brazenly corrupt officials are more brutal.

Multitudes throng us in every village we visited. Willing to clutch at straws in their desperation, their voices would go: “Have you written about my mentally challenged son?”… “I applied for old age pension long back.” … “I have been anxiously waiting for my widow pension card.” “They haven’t paid my NREGA wages.”

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